


more than that, and less, too

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: "This Year of Ours" Time Skip, F/F, Found Family, Light Canon-Typical Violence, The Brink™, the weirdness that comes with being a person who is also a space station
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-05 17:19:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14049066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: “What if…” Demani pauses. “I want us to be able to help. I want this station to be somewhere people can go. We don’t have the resources to do a lot. We can’t stabilize the political situation from here. But if this place can be something good, to someone, I want to do that.”(In the year after the Miracle, Gray and Demani build a home, a livelihood, a life.)





	more than that, and less, too

Just like that, it’s all over. Months of fighting, of running, of no chance to catch their breath. 

The Rapid Evening is going to leave them be, at least in theory.

The tiny transport ship docks at the old satellite base, and Gray hates to admit it but there’s something somehow comforting in being back here. The place has something of a home base for their operation (as much as they dare use it, when the Evening knows its location). It’s where she first spoke with Demani.

Demani, who is right now by her side, holding Gray’s hand in hers, warm and organic to the touch. She keys in the command to open the transport door, and then they step out together into the base.

For a long moment, they just stand there. Gray doesn’t know what the next step to this is.

“What time is it?” Demani asks.

“Late,” Gray says. She could be more specific; her internal clock runs to near-perfect accuracy. But she doesn’t need to. “Come on,” she adds, after a moment. “You should rest.”

“So should you,” Demani says, following Gray down the too-narrow hallway. Their hands remain linked as they walk. “Regardless of whether or not you actually need sleep, you’ve got to be exhausted.”

She isn’t wrong. The experience is so different from the kind of physical tiredness she was accustomed to in her old body that sometimes Gray doesn’t properly register it. But it’s there nonetheless, a dull weight at the back of her head, clouding her thoughts.

The main living space, as they enter it, is a strange sort of mess: half the remnants of its use as a satellite observation base (Gray’s personal things, half-read books, notes written on papers and screens and holograms), half the remnants of its use as a war room (bedrolls for the dozen-odd people who’ve come through, pieces of deconstructed weapons, notes written on papers and screens and holograms). Demani pauses a moment on the threshold to the space, and looks back at Gray.

“This is real,” she says.

“Yeah,” Gray says.

“Sorry.” She laughs softly.  “It’s just that it’s only now actually hitting me. That we did it. We disobeyed orders from Crystal Palace, and… we won? Or we came close, at least. Closer than I ever would have thought was possible six months ago. And now…” She squeezes Gray’s hand, and Gray moves towards her, their fingers interlaced, until she’s standing so close to Demani they’re almost touching, their faces inches apart (Gray could tell you how many, if she wanted to, could calculate out every angle of the space between them). “Now I’m here with you, Satellite,” Demani says. “And I don’t have anywhere else to be.” She meets Gray’s gaze as she speaks, and her eyes are warm and smiling and the color of the night sky back home, and her eyes and her face and her lips are so, so close. “Not right now.”

Gray kisses her. Once, quickly. 

Demani quirks her lip in a half-smile as Gray pulls away. Then she leans in close and kisses Gray back, and her lips are warm and gentle and seeking, and Gray cups the side of Demani’s face in her hand, pulls her closer, closer.

And Satellite is kissing Primary, kissing her like maybe it’s the first time and maybe it’s the last, but made all the sweeter because it’s neither.

When they break apart, Gray stares at her, studying every curve of her face. She has time for this now. There’s no rush, not anymore. There’s a part of her that wants to just kiss her again, to kiss Demani and never stop; and there’s a part of her that wants to talk, wants to ask her what she’s thinking, now, at every moment, to know every inch of her mind. Gray grasps for words, trying to express this, trying to think of anything that could possibly describe the feelings churning through her.

What comes out is, “Marry me?”

Demani blinks. “What?”

Nervousness spins through Gray, vibrates through her wiring. She hadn’t planned this. Or—well, she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about it, sometimes, in the last few months, at night when most of their little band of rebels was asleep. Toyed with the idea of it like she used to toy with the idea of intercession; something that felt _right_ when she thought about it but wasn’t part of her real life.

But now here she is.

“Demani Dusk,” she says, louder, pouring careful emphasis into each word. “Will you marry me?”

Demani laughs, a soft sound, and Gray nearly loses her non-existent breath just at the closeness of her. It’s a laugh she’s heard a million times before. But so often at a distance. And now—

“Yes,” Demani says. “Yes, of _course_.”

***

A week after the Rapid Evening declared a ceasefire, Gray is sitting with Demani, reading, a comfortable silence sitting between them, when finally she has to say something. “What do we do now?” 

Demani looks up. 

“I mean, with our lives,” Gray clarifies. 

“I don’t know,” Demani says slowly. She collapses the device she was using as a reader,  sets it aside. “What do you want to do?”

“I have no idea, to be honest,” Gray says. 

It’s been on her mind the last few days: what does her future look like? For so long, she’d had it laid out neatly before her: work hard enough and she’d get a position with the Evening, work hard enough and get chosen for the Satellite program, wait and watch and watch and watch for the next ten years, the next hundred, the next thousand. It was straightforward. Terrifying, sometimes, to think of all that time ahead of her, but straightforward. Something she could wrap her head around.

But now, Gray doesn’t know what her life looks like next month, never mind a hundred years from now.

“It’s just...” Gray searches for the words. “I’ve been thinking, you know? We have to do something, don’t we? We’re going to need to do some kind of supply run soon, if nothing else.” 

They’re almost out of food, on the base. Gray doesn’t need to eat, of course. She _can_ , but these days most of her energy comes from high-efficiency solar collectors. (The reason for this is the same reason she isn’t just data in the monitoring computer. It’s supposed to make the transition easier, to have these little physical things that remain.)

But Demani is still human, and she’s been rapidly working through their supply. Which means that soon, one of them will have to go out and figure out how they’re going to get more. Their current situation isn’t sustainable, not really.

“That’s definitely true.” Demani looks at her a moment, thinking. “And I’m sure I’ll figure something out. You shouldn’t worry, Satellite. But long term...”

“Yeah,” Gray says. Long term, who knows?

They sit in silence. Demani opens her mouth, closes it, then starts again. “We could leave,” she says.

Leave. Gray doesn’t know whether she means this little station or the Twilight Mirage in full. “I’m not sure I can,” she says aloud. “Not with—“ Gray gestures between her metallic body and the room around them. 

“We could figure it out,” Demani says. “No offense, Gray, but we’re pretty smart. I have full confidence we could break the connection I we wanted to. The question is if we want to.”

Gray doesn’t respond. It’s a tempting concept. They could do it: leave the Quire system behind, get as far from Rapid Evening space as they can and live out normal lives on some backwater planet somewhere. Space is big. There’s plenty of places to disappear to.

But, “No,” she says, “I don’t want to run.”

“Me neither,” Demani takes a deep breath. Gray wonders if she was hoping she would answer differently. Give her the excuse to take the easy option.

But if they were the type of people to take the easy option, they wouldn’t be here in the first place.

“So we stay,” Gray says, thinking aloud. “We stay here. We turn this place into somewhere that’s fit to live.” 

Demani bites her lip. “We’re not running,” she says. “I…” She sighs. “I want to help people, Gray. This isn’t just about you and me, you know?”

“I know,” Gray says.

“What if…” A pause. “I want us to be able to help. I want this station to be somewhere people can go. We don’t have the resources to do a lot. We can’t stabilize the political situation from here. But if this place can be something good, to someone, I want to do that.”

***

Gray double-checks the pressure readings from what were once her external sensors. Yes, it looks like the new room is at habitable levels. Air’s flowing in as expected. The temperature is half a degree below the rest of the station; Gray kicks up her mental thermostat.  “It looks  good,” she says aloud. “Care to do the honors?”

Demani smiles, unlatches the door, and pushes it open into a new space: a wide open room, the ceiling impossibly high compared to the hallway they were just standing in. Uneven light from above dapples the floor; Gray makes a mental note to see if there’s space in their budget for more lighting. The faint glow of the mirage seeps in through the wide windows, joining the electric lights, casting strange, muted shadows.

“It’s pretty nice,” Demani says softly. Her voice echoes slightly in the empty room.

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Gray says, running her hand along a wall. Being able to “see” the room from the point of view of the station doesn’t come close to comparing to finally being able to inhabit it.

They have space, now, which is more than they had when they first dreamt up the idea of the Brink, but it’s a space without anything in it. They still don’t have the infrastructure they need to support a lot of ships coming and going. Hell, they still don’t have enough _chairs_. But Gray looks at this room, and she can see it, in her mind’s eye, full of people.

She grins. “We’re close.”

“Yeah,” Demani says.

Gray looks out over the space for a long moment. Every day they get closer to something that could be a status quo she could live with.

“Oh,” Demani says, breaking into her thoughts. “That reminds me, I meant to tell you. Riven thinks she might have found a couple  people.”

Riven Obscurity—one of their supporters from the Rapid Evening rebellion, a dependable fighter and a brave soul, and one of a handful who’d opted to come on at the Brink when Gray had contacted them about the possibility. 

“That’s good,” Gray says.

But if this was going to be a place people came for calm and food and comfort, they were going to need more than a handful of ex-secret agents to run it. So the past few weeks, as they’d begun to assemble the physical structure of the Brink, they’d been discussing taking on employees—not a lot of people, of course, but as their plans expanded, trying to run this thing with just who they had currently was sounding harder and harder.  Sometimes practicalities had to be taken into consideration, even when designing your quaint way station on the edge of a near-magic nebula. Riven had been reaching out to people in the system. Gray hadn’t expected to get a response this fast.

“We’re close,” Demani says.

Gray laughs, and even though it isn’t really funny, Demani does too. (God, but she’s cute when she laughs.)

***

When Gray enters the room, Blueberri is washing the countertop, rubbing at the same section over and over, their gaze focused on some invisible point in the distance.

That isn’t even really their _job_.

Blueberri Jin joined the Brink a couple weeks ago now. After a series of long-distance messages made unreliable by the Mirage, Demani had told them to buy passage on a ship, and they’d showed up a week later, all nervous enthusiasm and quiet energy. They’d stammered out a few sentences about their parents having run a restaurant, so maybe they could help with that if they needed? 

Meeting them in person, Gray had remembered where she knew their name from, hated that she had. She didn’t say that she knew where Blueberri was coming from. That seemed like it crossed a line. Later, though, she did wonder whether that was the crueler option—to let Blueberri think they’d found a truly fresh start when that wasn’t the case.

That wasn’t fair. Blueberri could have as fresh a start here as they wanted, whatever Gray knows from her days as an intelligence agent. 

Now, Gray watches them for another moment before saying, “Hey.”

They look up, stiffening in surprise.

“Relax,” Gray says, stepping forward. “I think that you’ve got that spot under control.” She nods towards the counter. “Really, you don’t need to be cleaning. Certainly not right now.”

“Yeah,” Blueberri says, and laughs awkwardly. “I guess I’m just… nervous? I needed to do something to get ready. To keep my hands busy.”

“We’re ready,” Gray says. They had been for the last week, really, as they prepped and planned and perfected the station. Today’s the day they set for the opening, though Gray wonders if putting the weight of it on one day might have been a bad idea. Odds were, no one would come through this part of space today anyways, no matter how many messages they’d been quietly slipping out to their contacts across the system.

“Look,” Gray says, “there’s no ceremony or anything. No ribbon-cutting. We’ve already done it. Let’s celebrate.”

Blueberri is still for a moment, hesitating, then nods, and follows Gray into the back.

“Demani,” Gray says, through the intercom on the other side of the station. In her robotic chassis, she listens as Blueberri makes a mumbled apology for their own nervousness. “Can you—“

“Gray, look,” Demani says, at the exact same moment that Gray spots the shape of a ship, pulling closer and closer to the station.

Gray starts running a scan. “I’m looking,” she says.

From the sight of it, it’s old enough that she should have more information somewhere in her databanks. Yes: definitely of Divine Fleet make, definitely pre-Miracle. Name, serial number, last known captain—

A docking request pings in, and it finally clicks that the ship itself doesn’t really matter. Whoever’s onboard, they’re headed here intentionally.

The Brink is ready for them.

***

It’s moving towards evening, and while in the month it’s been operational Gray has never seen the Brink _crowded_ , this is when they tend to get the most traffic. People form small clusters, sitting and talking and laughing. One, his hair a mess of pink and black, sits alone, in the corner, and Gray watches him from her spot behind the bar—Meridiem is out sick, so she’s taking his shift for today. 

She considers trying to strike up a conversation, with the person sitting alone, but before she can chase the thought down all that far she’s distracted by another ship docking at the station.

Funny; don’t see a lot of vessels coming from Brighton. The only Rogue Wave ships that usually make it to this part of the sector are Herringbone, and even those are rather infrequent. But this is Quire, and things are changing every day. A Brighton ship isn’t that much of a surprise.

The boy with the pink hair isn’t staring into his glass, anymore. He’s staring at the _Help Wante_ d poster on the far wall. Gray keeps an eye on him as she helps someone else with their order, as a few of the Brightoners cross from the docking space into the Brink proper. 

She freezes, a half-second of surprise, at the sight of the man trailing the Brighton captain. 

“Well,” she says, as he approaches the bar. “Gig Kep-hart.”

He blinks, a half-second of surprise, then breaks into a grin. “You a fan?”

“Something like that.” There isn’t really any good way to tell someone that you used to watch their exploits via satellite data, that you and your fiancée used to use their friends as metaphors. Gray’s long since come to terms with this, but it’s still strange, to see Gig in the flesh, as a presence tangible rather than theoretical.

“So,” she says, “how can I help you?”

They chat a little longer. Gig asks if she’s seen any of the more recent videos, Gray has to admit that she hasn’t. A year ago—hell, a few months ago—this interaction would have been unthinkable. But the Rapid Evening doesn’t rule Gray’s life any longer. She gets to be a part of this conversation.

Kep-hart wanders off, after a little while. Gray looks around the room.

The boy with the pink hair has stood, and is actively reading the poster now.

Gray studies him a moment longer and then says, “You interested?”

He flinches, just a little, and turns towards her but doesn’t meet her eyes. (He’s familiar, Gray realizes, the same way Blueberri and Gig were, but she doesn’t chase down the thought.) “Uh,” he says. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I have much relevant experience.” 

“That’s okay,” Gray says. He doesn’t respond. “What’s your name?”

“Morning’s—“ He stops himself. “Um. Observation Morning, I guess?”

“You guess?”

He shrugs.

Gray laughs. “Well, Observation,” she says, watching his expression as she tries the name, “if you’re interested, I’m serious when I say that we don’t have especially high entry requirements. If you want to stick around, try and help out, you’re more than welcome to. The pay isn’t amazing, but room and board is included. We can always use another set of hands around here.”

She doesn’t say: you look like you’re looking for somewhere to fit in, and I’d like to think we can offer that.

He looks at her for a long moment. “I’ll think about it.”

***

“Hey, Gray?”

Demani’s voice drags Gray’s attention into the back room, where she sits with Riven, the latter’s face stony and unreadable. Demani’s gaze flicks towards her as she speaks.

“Yeah?” Gray’s body is still out in the other room, talking with Morning’s Observation about shipping numbers. But she can split her attention well enough.

“Have you... picked up anything _weird_ recently from the direction of Evening space?”

“No,” Gray says slowly, even as she speaks looking back at the data from the last few days, but no, there haven’t been any ships heading out—at least, if there are, they’re incredibly well-cloaked. That doesn’t seem likely; Gray’s systems are miles ahead of most around here. But they’re also based off Rapid Evening tech, so if _anyone_ had a chance of countering them... “Why? Did something happen?”

“There’s...” Demani glances towards Riven.

“Some of our contacts have said they’ve been hearing rumors recently. Probably they’re just that, but...” Riven shrugs, the gesture forced in its casualness.

“Goddamnit,” Gray mutters.

“What?”

Gray blinks. Observation is looking at her in surprise, and Gray realizes that she must have said that aloud. Or... aloud isn’t quite the word; she meant to say that aloud. But said it from her mobile body, rather than the station’s speaker system.

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s... well, I don’t want to say it isn’t anything important, but it probably isn’t anything you need to be worrying yourself about quite yet.”

He nods slowly, still watching her, not moving.

“Rapid Evening stuff,” Gray says with a sigh.

“Oh,” he says. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Gray’s pretty sure Observation knows the broad strokes of her and Demani’s story; most people who were in Fleet the day of the Miracle do, and he was more closely involved than most. But she hasn’t had a real conversation about it with him since they took him on.

“Is it true, then?” Observation says suddenly. “What people have been saying recently?”

“What have they been saying?”

He scrunches his nose. “I mean,” he says, “it’s just what I’ve heard. People talk about a lot of shit around here.”

“What have they been saying?” Gray repeats.

“That the Rapid Evening’s been sending ships down to the planets.” Is it possible? It might be. Ships might just mean remote probes in this context; it’s possible whoever saw them didn’t know enough about Evening tech to tell the difference. She doesn’t know why they would be doing that, but Gray can’t pretend to understand he logic behind Crystal Palace’s decisions—“Or that they’ve been sending ships to infiltrate the Rogue Wave,” Observation continues. “Or that they’re secretly in control of the NEH, or… You get the idea. I assumed it was all just bullshit, but…”

It’s rumors. Gray _knows_ that it’s rumors, and nothing more. But that doesn’t stop her from worrying. From wondering.

Gray takes a deep breath (or an imitation of one). “It probably is. I wouldn’t worry about it,” she says aloud, to Observation. With the other half of her mind, she quietly tells Demani and Riven what he’s said. Just in case.

“I’ll look into it,” Riven says, and stands to go, leaving Demani alone in the living room.

Demani’s gaze lingers in the direction Riven left in for a long while before saying, “I don’t know that any of us are ever going to be able to leave our past behind. Not really.”

 

It’s her father, is the thing, anything that happens all comes back to Gray’s father. She hasn’t seen him since she took the post as satellite observer, hasn’t spoken with him since the rebellion began. Is he okay? Does he think about her?

Would he make the call to move on them, if it came to it?

It’s not like there’s anything she can do about it, either way.

“No,” Grey says. “No, we… The Rapid Evening is always going to be a part of me.” In her head, she’d meant the words figuratively, but she sees the look on Demani’s face and realizes that her words are true far-too-literally.

The thing that Grey is now—synthetic, wired in—is because of the Evening. That’s just a fact, just like if she’d lived a different life without the Evening she would never have met Demani. (Some things almost make her think it was worth it.)

“We’ll be okay,” Demani says, shaking her head. “I have confidence.”

The funny thing is, Gray does too.

***

Demani laughs at something Blueberri’s just said, then shakes her head, turns serious, says, “What do you think, Gray?” Only—

Something is _wrong_. Gray knows this as a fact, suddenly and without cause: something is very wrong. It’s not here, it’s not with this conversation (a hand on Gray’s shoulder, Demani’s voice speaking softly to her). Something is wrong, bigger than that. Not the Rapid Evening, not anything approaching, smaller than that—

The station. Something is wrong with the station. And Gray can feel it, in the back of her head, and it doesn’t quite _hurt_ but it does feel wrong wrong wrong, like something in her brain has been turned inside-out. 

Gray runs through the systems; it isn’t lights it isn’t the loading bay it isn’t anything in the kitchen. It isn’t the doors, the climate controls—

There, an error, she can’t access _that_ one. What is it?

Oxygen management.

That’s... Okay. That’s not good.

Gray probes at the system in her mind, shoves at it, but it continues to come up as a blank wall of nothing.

Okay. Okay. This might not be as terrible as it looks like. It’s entirely possible that it’s only Gray’s connection that’s broken, and that the air filters are entirely functional. But it doesn’t _feel_ like that. 

“—okay? Gray? Satellite, Gray, listen to me.”

Gray blinks, forces herself back into an awareness of her humanoid body. Demani is gripping Gray’s right hand with both of hers, her gaze full of quiet worry. Blueberri and Morning watch from a slight distance.

“I’m fine,” Gray says, though it comes out quieter than she intended. “I think the oxygen cycler is broken.”

Demani frowns. “Maybe we should think about decoupling some of the station controls from your main systems after all,” she says.

Gray shakes her head. “That’s not what’s important right now.”

Demani opens her mouth as if she’s about to protest, then just says. “Right,” she says. She takes a breath. “Observation, can you go down to manual controls and take a look at things? See if anything’s obviously wrong?”

“Sure?” Observation says, slowly. “I don’t really know… How that thing is _supposed_ to work, but sure.”

“I’ll come with you,” Gray says, ignoring Demani’s worried look. Really, she’s fine. And Demani knows as well as she does that the station’s manual controls are a mess, half of them scrapped together with whatever they could find and half of them built to be used by someone who’s already jacked into the observer’s base systems. Observation’s going to need Gray’s help.

She stands straighter, lifts her hand from Demani’s (only regrets it for a second), and nods to Morning to start moving.

They make their way through the hallways without any further conversation. Observation’s been here months now; he knows his way around as well as any of the others, even if he’d deny it if you asked. Gray tries to move quickly, wheels gliding across the metallic floors faster than Observation can keep up with. There’s a hole in her head where oxygen cycling is supposed to be. She _needs_ to know that everything is okay and working.

Gray grabs a hold of the doorway to pull herself to a stop as she rolls past, slides into the too-small room. 

The walls of the sort-of-kind-of-engineering space are littered with wires and glittering lights, big hand-operated levers and switches. Gray can identify them automatically, not a visual overlay but information that’s just _there_ , because it needs to be. A huge air tank fills a section of the wall to Gray’s right, a series of tangled pipes criss-crossing the ceiling above her. Nothing looks wrong at first glance. Gray runs a hand along the tank’s surface as Observation stumbles into the room after her.

“Are you sure you needed me for this?”

“No,” Gray says, not turning to look. He laughs, which is good. Gray isn’t sure she can laugh just now. She’s too busy poking at the blank space in her mind, too busy imagining half the people on the station dying slow, painful deaths as the oxygen systems fail completely and the air just… runs out.

The gauge on the tank is at normal levels. Maybe everything’s fine? It’s not as comforting as she wants it to be. Seeing this information, externalized in front of her, the arrow pointed at green, isn’t the same as _knowing_ it the way that she should be able to.

There’s a tiny, grayscale screen to the side of the tank itself, with a grand total of four buttons beneath it; Gray presses one without having to think, and text blinks onto the screen. She gets through half of a relieved sigh before she processes that the text just reads _ERROR_.

Gray hits another combination of buttons, her fingers shaky.

_ERROR: Unknown mechanical issue. Check pipes._

Not good.

Gray cranes her head up to look at the pipes snaking across the ceiling. There’s no obvious issues, but—

A faint hissing. 

Then: an explosion of metal rains down on Gray’s head, hard and cool, and Observation beside her flinches away as Gray stares up at the place in the ceiling where there used to be a pipe. Gas is rushing out, mixing with the rest of the air, who knows which pipe that was?

She needs to move fast.

Her fingers fly to the buttons again, keying in the sequence to close off the tank, but it’s not working not working not working and its contents are dipping and for now everything is fine but this could go so, so badly _so_ _easily_. 

“Morning,” Gray says, not taking her eyes off the tank, “Is the hole visible? Can you try to patch it?” Her voice shakes.

He doesn’t answer right away, and Gray turns to look at him. He nods when she makes eye contact, and turns to the door. “I’m gonna go get… Tape or something.”

And then he’s gone. And Gray is alone with the broken pipe and the sound of oxygen—she’s sure it’s the oxygen, now—escaping.

It’s fine. Probably. Almost certainly. They have spare oxygen for a reason. It’s not like anyone’s going to suffocate right away. (It’s not like Gray is going to suffocate, ever.) All they have to do is patch this, and then it will be fine. Except for the part where Gray has no idea how big the hole is or what caused it, and the computer systems aren’t working the way they’re supposed to, and she should have been able to tell that something was wrong, shouldn’t she? (She did, yes, but far too late.) She should have been able to prevent this, and now everyone is going to die, and it will be _her fault_.

“Gray?”

Gray flinches at the unexpected noise. Demani is standing in the doorway, watching her, and Gray realizes she’s been pressing the same button over and over again for the past thirty seconds, and it isn’t doing anything. She forces herself to step back from the controls.

“It’s bad,” Gray says.

“Yeah,” Demani says, stepping towards her. “Observation looked… pretty freaked out. Is there anything I can do?”

Gray doesn’t meet her gaze. Is there anything Demani can do? Shouldn’t there be something? If this is such an emergency, why can’t she see a way forward? “No,” she says, quiet. “I don’t think there is.”

“Okay.” Demani takes Gray’s hand again, the same as she had when Gray froze out in the dining room, and something in Gray’s chest unclenches. “Is there anything _you_ can do?”

Gray manages a smile. “Probably not.”

They stand there a moment, quiet, and Gray forces herself to calm down. This emergency isn’t immediate. It’s bad, but they have time. Demani isn’t going to die right now.

That’s what she was worried about, wasn’t it? It’s all so close to falling apart, right here and now. This fragile thing they’ve built could crumble, if Gray can’t fix this.

If _they_ can’t fix this.

She dares a glance up towards the broken pipe. She reaches up and runs a hand along its sharp edge, and it’s _cold_. Colder than it should be.In her mind, Gray prods at the heating systems, and—yes, there. An error code from a few days back, from right here in this room. Not high enough priority to attract her attention, but enough to screw up the temperature of the air in the pipes.

The system shouldn’t have been that fragile in the first place, but now that she knows what the problem is, she can solve it. In theory, anyway.

Observation appears in the doorway, holding a thick roll of black tape. Gray squeezes Demani’s hand, says, “Hey. Can you hand that over? I think we can still fix this.”

***

Gray is there when it comes up for the first time: it’s late, and the place is empty, and most of the organics who make their home at the Brink are all just the slightest bit drunk, and Morning mentions in passing that he used to work with the Beloved. (“Well, sort of.”)

Blueberri’s eyes light up. “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” they say, “do you know Signet?”

“Signet—yeah!” He laughs. “Wait, do you like, _know_ her, or just—she’s like, an important religious figure or whatever, right? Is she just famous?”

“She’s a friend of mine,“ Blueberri says, with a smile. “Though I’m pretty sure she is also kinda famous.”

“How did you know her?” Observation says. 

“She…“ Blueberri stops. Their voice goes very quiet as they say, “We met when I was in Contrition’s Figure.”

Gray glances towards Demani, sitting on the other side of her from Blueberri. She feels somehow like she should say something, but she has no idea what that would be. All of their lives were tangled up in strange ways before they ever really met, but she doesn’t know how to begin to explain that. Or if they would even really care.

Morning doesn’t say anything, but surprise is evident on his face; Gray isn’t sure how much he knows about the old Divine prison, as an outsider, but he clearly recognizes the name.

“Yeah,” Blueberri says. “It’s… Yeah. I was in Contrition’s. It feels good to say that aloud?” They run a finger along the rim of their glass, and take a deep breath. “I ran,” they say, their voice suddenly harsh. “I got out before I was supposed to. The evacuation… They just turned the thing off. And you’re not supposed to _do_ that, there’s supposed to be a whole adjustment period, to get your brain used to being in a less Mesh-dense space.” They snort. “Though it would be hard to do that now, I guess. But, yeah. They let us out, back when they thought they were gonna have to load people off ships individually. And then, that didn’t happen. And no one was really paying attention. So I just left.” They look down at the empty glass in their hands. 

Gray puts a hand on their shoulder, in a vague attempt at comfort. They make eye contact with her for a half a second.

“Probably wouldn’t have mattered anyways,” they say. “I don’t think that place is still up and running. But… I was making progress, everyone kept saying that I was making progress, and then I just left. I don’t feel like that’s what someone who was making progress would do.” 

They look up at Gray, as if she has the answers.

She doesn’t feel like she does. 

“Look,” she says, after a moment. Because she has to say something. “I can’t tell you if you did the right thing. I can’t know that. We all have to live with the choices we make.”

Blueberri nods.

“I’m glad you’re here, now, though,” Gray says, softer, and for an instant a smile flickers across their face.

***

Gray doesn’t help in the kitchen often. Her “job” on the station is the technical stuff, the organizational stuff.

But today is the Fleet’s old harvest holiday, and not many of the Brink’s residents are from that culture but Blueberri has made it quite clear that just because the Divine Fleet no longer exists doesn’t mean they aren’t going to insist on the traditional meal for breakfast. Truth be told, Gray doesn’t especially mind being roped into helping.

So today, she’s in the kitchen, rolling out dough as some of the others chatter quietly. It’s strangely tactile work. The pastry recipe is from Ziishe, one that Riven had dug up, and Blueberri had raised an eyebrow when she had shown it to them but hadn’t complained.

They had holidays, too, is the thing.

(Blueberri had haltingly tried to ask if there was anything from Earth that Observation missed, but he just shrugged and said that it wouldn’t be the same with the ingredients from around here anyway. They hadn’t argued.)

The room is too small for the number of people they’ve squeezed into it, Morning darting in and out with supplies and plates and things, Gamble and Meridiem criss-crossing the space as they move from one work station to another; Riven is over by Blueberri, their hands brushing as they show her the right way to prepare some dish. 

The third time she bumps into someone, Gray raises her hands in defeat and says, “Do you think you need me here, physically? It seems like I’d probably do more good helping elsewhere.”

“But I’d miss your pretty face,” Demani says, and Gray laughs at that, but she stays.

An hour or so later, all of them sit down to a mismatched meal at one of the Brink’s dining tables. 

A handful of travelers had already arrived—they weren’t going to turn them away, even for this—and Gray has them join the table, asks them where they’re headed. Grand Magnificent mutters something about business as usual; one of the others says they’re headed to Gift-3 to reconnect with family.

Demani smiles at Gray from across the table, as the traveler explains this to her. At the other end of the table, Blueberri, laughs at some joke of Observation’s. A warmth hangs in the air; one that doesn’t register on any of Gray’s temperature sensors, but is real just the same.

***

“Observation?” says a loud voice out on the docks, and Gray finds herself watching with the station’s eyes as a stranger—NEH, she would guess, based just on his clothes—looks at Morning in surprise. 

Observation blinks, his posture tense, and says, slowly, “Shade?”

“It’s been forever!” the stranger—Shade—says, putting an arm around him. “How are you doing? How did I not know your were here?”

Morning doesn’t respond, just looks at Shade with wide eyes.

Gray keeps half a metaphorical ear on the conversation as she goes back to work. Morning doesn’t talk about his time with the NEH army very often. She can’t see this ending well.

“When was the last time we saw each other?” Shade says, apparently oblivious to Observation’s discomfort.

“Earth,” he says.

Oh.

“But it must have been what? Ten, fifteen years ago?”

“No,” Observation says, brows furrowing, “no, it was only a month or so before I left—“

“Before you left, fifteen years ago.”

“Oh,” Observation says. “Ohhh.” A beat. “This fucking place, Shade.”

Time doesn’t work quite right, in the Mirage. Throw in the NEH’s cry ships and you’ve got a mess of mismatched timelines crisscrossing every day. Gray’s seen it happen before. Just not often on so personal a level.

Shade looks at Observation again. “How long has it been for you?”

“Um.” Morning pauses. “I think…“ His tone is thoughtful, less nervous than before. “Maybe a full year now, since I arrived?”

“And you’ve been here that whole time?”

“No, just the last several months.”

“Oh—you were with the corps before that, right? You must have seen some shit—what was the Miracle like?”

Gray, with the part of her mind that is the station, double-checks their supplies; cross-references it with the manifests of the ships currently approaching. They need to restock a couple things.

“Where _is_ Song?”

“What?” Observation goes tense, all the ease that had been slowly slipping into his posture during the conversation evaporating like water in the desert. “I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s… I’m sure he’s fine.”

Shade raises an eyebrow. “You don’t sound sure.”

“We don’t need to talk about this,” Morning says. A statement, not a request.

“Excuse me,” says a voice, in some hallway on the other side of the station, “do you have directions to—“ And Gray is more than happy to help out. She makes conversation as she gives them directions, asking them about their travels, about where they’ve been. It’s casual small talk, but these days that’s something Gray finds herself relishing. She went a long time without small talk.

Across the room, Shade is saying, “You should come! Wish is there—she came on the same detachment as me—and hey, for all I know Song’s there, too.”

“I... I don’t know.”

“You–why not?”

“It’s complicated, man. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea, okay?”

Would he go, Gray wonders, if he thought he could? If he could return to his old life with no consequences, would he? She isn’t sure she’d blame him if he did. 

“Come on, Observation. Don’t tell me you’re not dying to be around—“ He lowers his voice—“ _normal_ people, again.”

Observation doesn’t respond.

Should she intervene? Was this going to go badly, after all? The Brink is neutral ground. She could justifiably kick this guy out for that kind of comment. But she can’t be sure how Observation would feel about her interfering at this point.

“I think you should go, Shade,” Observation says. 

Gray has to stop herself from sighing aloud with relief.

“What?”

“I think you should go.”

He stands looking at Observation in silence for a moment. Then he turns, and goes. Halfway to his ship, though, he stops. “What does this place have that’s so great, anyway?”

“I—“ Observation frowns. “I don’t know,” he says. “They make a pretty good breakfast, I guess.”

***

It takes Gray a moment to register what the sound is, it’s been so long since she’s heard gunfire. 

It’s a single, sharp shot, echoing through the room and leaving a tense silence in its wake. Gray lays a hand on wall of the hallway, where her body is standing, for fear she’ll fall over.

In the time that it takes her to get to the main room, unable to make sense of the rush of sensory input, that shot could have been at anyone. Riven or Observation could be lying dead on the ground right now. 

It could be Demani.

It isn’t. Demani is by Gray’s side almost as soon as she’s entered. She moves with perfect confidence, but as she lays a light hand on Gray’s shoulder Gray can feel it shaking. She nods towards the other side of the room, where a woman is standing, wearing a Herringbone officer’s coat, already in the process of reloading the entire front half of her weapon.

The person standing across from her takes another step back, fumbling for a weapon at their belt, pulls a silver-blue blade from its sheath as the Herringbone woman fires again. The people around them watch in stunned, stiff silence, no one daring to move. 

One of them is Riven, standing frozen in the middle of leaning down to talk to someone Gray vaguely recognizes as a friend of hers. 

The shot just barely misses, hitting the metal surface of the floor with a hiss. 

There is no time for thought, only reaction. Gray shrugs off Demani’s hand and crosses the room towards the site of the conflict. 

All eyes on her. The pirate, eyebrow raised in disdain; Riven, face carefully neutral now, the shock passed but not the danger; Demani, across the room, barely visible from where Gray is now but present nonetheless.

“Put the weapon down,” Gray says.

A laugh. “I don’t think I will,” the woman says, adjusts her aim towards Gray, and there’s only a split second to react, and Gray lunges forward, grabbing for the gun, and her hand closes on it as the laser fires and then everything is heat and heat and heat and pain.

Then Gray is on the floor, the barrel of the gun still clutched in her hand. At least, she’s pretty sure that’s the case; she can’t feel much in that hand anymore. The Herringbone woman stoops over her, and Gray knows she needs to move but she isn’t sure she could if she tried. This body is far-away and distant; she watches from her vantage as the station as the pirate reaches to grab her weapon, and Gray has to, has to, has to move, summons all of her strength and energy and pours it into this one simple movement, jerks her hand away from the pirate’s outstretched grasp.

It’s not enough, can’t possibly be enough—

A familiar hand reaches down and picks up the gun. Demani glances down at the object in her hand, weighing it. She holds it less like a gun and more like a bomb, like something that could explode in any direction. (It could, really. Quire can be tricky like that.)

The pirate pulls a knife from her pocket.

“Please don’t,” Demani says, with a half-affected sigh. “Look, where’s your ship? Why don’t I…”

Gray’s hand convulses, involuntary, electricity still streaking across her arm from where the laser fire hit. The world goes black.

***

Gray awakes— _awakes_ , how can she wake, she doesn’t _sleep_ —to the sound of her name, and her visual sensors snap on as she processes all of this. She can see Demani standing over her, and as Gray tilts her head towards her, she lets out a slow breath.

“Are you okay?” she says.

“I think so,” Gray says slowly, and only as she’s speaking does the rush of memories—the Herringbone woman, the gun, the chaos—come back to her.

“That was reckless, Gray,” Demani says, taking a seat beside where Gray’s body is positioned on the floor.

“Yeah,” Gray says. She reaches out in her mind for the rest of the station, relaxes as she finds the familiar shape of it, unaltered by her brief absence.

Gray still can’t feel her right hand. She runs a finger over the fried edges of circuitry poking out from the robotics, doesn’t look down. It’s an easy enough replacement. This particular body—it’s not that it isn’t a part of her, but it’s not the whole of her. She can leave pieces behind if she needs to. 

But that’s a project for later. For now, Demani, sitting beside her, moves closer, her body a warm weight against Gray’s side. She leans her head against Gray’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Gray says.

“Don’t be.” Demani doesn’t move from her position, eyes closed, breathing even. “If you’re okay, that’s what matters.”

“I’m okay.”

“Good.”

Quiet, then. If Gray listens, she can still hear out into the other rooms, can still sense the motion of the station through space. But here, with Demani, it’s quiet.

“Satellite.”

Gray opens her eyes. “Yeah?”

“Did we do the right thing?”

Gray doesn’t respond immediately. “You mean today?”

“Yeah,” Demani says. “But—also not really. I mean all of it. Defecting. Staying. Building this.” She sits up as she speaks, gestures at the space around them. “What happened today—we prevented one tiny act of violence, but we still don’t even really know if we were in the right. Maybe that person had good reason for pulling a weapon. Now we’ll never know. Or—I don’t know. Even if she didn’t, what good does this do? Isn’t she just going to go hurt someone else now?”

“It could have been worse,” Gray says.

“But it also could have been a lot better.” She’s right, of course. There’s no denying that fact. “I just… I know that it has to be irrational, but sometimes I worry we’re doing as much harm as we are good, by trying to do anything.”

Gray hums in quiet acknowledgement. That isn’t the case, but she isn’t sure how to express that in a way that’s actually helpful.

She could just say, “That isn’t true,” but Demani already knows that. The problem is she can’t _feel_ it. 

She could say, “What happened today wasn’t your fault, Primary. It wasn’t any of ours, and the simple fact that we prevented it from getting worse than it did is a success, not a failure.”

She could say, “You once told me we were a loaded gun, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. About how we went from being that to being this, about how these days a loaded gun doesn’t mean quite the same thing that it used to: you think you’re going to hurt someone and instead it just _blossoms_.”

Instead, she intertwines her fingers with Demani’s, meets her eyes. She doesn’t say any of these things. She doesn’t need to.

It’s not that end of the conversation, but it’s something.

They talk a while longer. The conversation drifts. They talk about how they met, how they got to where they are, about each of the people who’s trusted them enough to make their home here with them. 

After hours, Demani’s need for sleep finally overtakes her, and she drifts off, still sitting on the floor of her bedroom besides Gray’s robotic form.

In the morning, she awakes. Sits up, stretches, mutters something to herself about the stiffness of the floor, then catches sight of Gray still watching her. 

“Morning,” she says.

“Good morning,” Gray says. She stumbles over the words a little, her tongue clumsy from hours of inactivity.

Demani reaches out and cups Gray’s face in her hand, for just a moment, her fingers barely brushing Gray’s cheeks. She looks at Gray in silence for a long moment, her wide, dark eyes an entire glittering universe.

Across the station, Gray can faintly hear Blueberri setting up for the day, can sense the ship a few hundred miles away and closing. But none of that holds her attention the way the warmth of Demani’s hand does, or the the soft smile playing at Demani’s lips.

Demani pulls her head close and lays a kiss on her forehead. She’s still smiling as she pulls away.

“I love you,” Gray says, because suddenly that feeling is too much to keep inside. This woman sitting so close to her—how can even those three words describe the quiet storm of emotions in Gray’s chest? How can anything?

And across the station, the sounds of the morning. Across the station, the sounds of the Brink. Soon, Gray will shift her attention to that, soon she and Demani will get up and prepare for the day. They’ll go to work. Make sure this place is what it was supposed to be.

And that’s thrilling, in its own way.

Just as thrilling: Demani’s quiet laugh as she stands, and reaches out a hand to help Gray up.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm confusedbluesky on tumblr & twitter if you want to come shout about podcasts with me


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